Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile

By Pilar M. Herr

Throughout the colonial period the Spanish crown made numerous unsuccessful attempts to conquer Araucanía, Chile’s southern borderlands region. Contested Nation argues that with Chilean independence, Araucanía—because of its status as a separate nation-state—became essential to the territorial integrity of the new Chilean Republic. This book studies how Araucanía’s indigenous inhabitants, the Mapuche, played a central role in the new Chilean state’s pursuit of an expansionist policy that simultaneously exalted indigenous bravery while relegating the Mapuche to second-class citizenship. It also examines other subaltern groups, particularly bandits, who challenged the nation-state’s monopoly on force and were thus regarded as criminals and enemies unfit for citizenship in Chilean society.

Pilar M. Herr’s work advances our understanding of early state formation in Chile by viewing this process through the lens of Chilean-Mapuche relations. She provides a thorough historical context and suggests that Araucanía was central to the process of post-independence nation building and territorial expansion in Chile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780826360953

Pilar M. Herr

Pilar M. Herr is an assistant professor of history and the coordinator for the Vira I. Heinz Program for Women in Global Leadership at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.

Book preview

Contested Nation

Contested Nation

The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile

Pilar M. Herr

University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque

© 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2019

First Paperback Edition, 2021

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8263-6094-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8263-6331-2 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8263-6095-3 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950235

Cover illustration: "Mapa de una parte de Chile que comprende el terreno

donde pasaron los famosos hechos entre españoles y araucanos" by

Tomás López de Vargas, 1777. Collection Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

Designed by Felicia Cedillos

Composed in Adobe Caslon Pro

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE. Introduction

CHAPTER TWO. The Legal Formation of the Chilean State

CHAPTER THREE. Enemies of the State: The Pincheira Montonera

CHAPTER FOUR. Mapuche Alliances

CHAPTER FIVE. Parlamentos

CHAPTER SIX. Notions of Chilean Citizenship

CHAPTER SEVEN. Concluding Thoughts

APPENDIX. Parlamentos 1825 and After

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has been a journey in itself. First, I’d like to thank my colleagues and friends at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg (Pitt–Greensburg), who in separate ways encouraged me. Sayre Greensfield, thanks for the many conversations; Stacey Triplette and Bill Campbell, thanks for reading portions; Eric Kimball, without you, the history program wouldn’t be as strong as it is; Nancy Estrada, Anne Czerwinski, Lipika Mazumdar, and Jackie Horrall, thanks for the many conversations, laughter, tears, and your friendship. Second, I’m grateful for the many talented undergraduate students at Pitt–Greensburg I have had the pleasure to teach for the past two decades, many of whom provided suggestions over the years. A special thanks go to my exceptional undergraduate research assistants James Weir and Alex Fell.

Professional colleagues also aided me in this endeavor, and I’d like to especially thank Owen H. Jones and John Bawden for helpful encouragement in dark times; Bryan DeLay for inviting me to present at the American Historical Association conference and quietly encouraging me to write the book; David A. Nichols for reading an early draft; and Peter Guardino and Erick D. Langer, who have believed in this project since the beginning.

Thank you to the many helpful archivists of the Archivo Nacional de Chile in Santiago for their assistance in obtaining valuable primary source materials; thanks to the reviewers who provided invaluable advice and suggestions; and thank you W. Clark Whitehorn at University of New Mexico Press for your willingness to support my project.

I’d like to thank my parents and sister, as well as my extended family in Chile, for lots of hugs, words of advice, laughter, and love. Lastly, I dedicate this book to my husband, Andy, and my daughters, Sofia and Clara. Without them, this book would not exist.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

ON NOVEMBER 25, 1825, THE PINCHEIRA BROTHERS AND THEIR Pehuenche allies set out to raid Parral, a town outside the city of Chillán, located near the Andes cordillera (mountain range) deep in Araucanía, Chile’s southern borderlands. Federal infantry guarding the area saw them approach and successfully repelled their attack. While making their escape, the Pincheiras counterattacked, killing the captain and fifty-two soldiers, leaving only eighteen to flee. Although on this occasion the Pincheiras’ men were unable to capture any loot or women, on countless other raids they were successful, netting a considerable economic profit for themselves as well as a reputation for ferocity, criminality, and cruelty. Incidents such as this one became so commonplace that the bandits considered themselves owners of the area[s] [pillaged] and killed anyone who opposed them.¹

Ten years earlier, el Libertador Simón Bolívar had praised Chile, claiming,

If any American republic is to have a long life, I am inclined to believe it will be Chile. There the spirit of liberty has never been extinguished; the vices of Europe and Asia arrived too late or not at all to corrupt the customs of that distant corner of the world. Its area is limited; and, as it is remote from other peoples, it will always remain free from contamination. Chile will not alter her laws, ways, and practices. She will preserve her uniform political and religious views. In a word, it is possible for Chile to be free.²

Chilean elites did indeed consolidate political power and create a national state independent of Spain in the early nineteenth century. In addition to establishing a strong, centralized state, Chile’s new leaders sought to expand Chile’s geographical boundary southward to Cape Horn. This territory included Araucanía,³ home to multiple indigenous groups known collectively as the Mapuche, whom Chile’s leaders sought to incorporate into the dominant European society. The Spanish Empire never controlled Araucanía, even though the Spanish crown spent considerable sums of money in equipping a militia on the Araucanian borderlands and sent missionaries into the territory. Araucanía was also home to bandits, who controlled a lucrative trade network and allied with various Mapuche groups to maintain their economic influence in the region. After independence, Chile’s leaders first worked to eliminate the bandits, whom they considered enemies, and then spent the better part of the nineteenth century attempting to subjugate the Mapuche into mainstream Chilean society while systematically removing them from their native lands to points farther south.

This study contends that Araucanía, its Mapuche inhabitants, and bandits were central to the process of state formation in Chile because after independence in 1818, territorial expansion and acquisition beyond Araucanía became the state’s primary goal. In trans-Araucanía, both Mapuches and bandits vehemently opposed state expansion but for different reasons, explored at length in this book. Mapuches fought for autonomy and independence against state encroachment upon their lands and their culture, and bandits opposed the Chilean state because it prevented the expansion of their lucrative trade in cattle and other goods. A close look at this period through the lens of Chilean–Mapuche relations aids in understanding early state formation during Chile’s dual process of territorial acquisition and cultural and political conquest of Araucanía.

Additionally, the disputed behavior of these bandits and Mapuches affected and influenced the actions Chile’s leaders undertook in drafting and passing the 1833 constitution, which emphasized law and order and mirrored the state’s perceived need to maintain social control in its territories. Furthermore, it laid the institutional foundation for Chile’s lengthy period of political stability, which lasted well into the twentieth century; allowed the newly created nation-state to embark on a lengthy and extensive geographical conquest of territories south of the boundary line at the Bío-Bío River; and included legislation aimed at subsuming and incorporating indigenous peoples as well as former bandits in that territory into the newly established Chilean state. This legislation resulted in an Indian pacification⁴ program that the state did not fully implement until after 1884. Nonetheless, the state simultaneously denied these peoples proper citizenship as full Chileans because of their ethnicity and position as subalterns, which led to decades of periodic violence between the Chilean military and the Mapuche in Araucanía. The presence of a frontier army in the disputed territory belied the perceived notion that Chile had achieved stability and peace. Institutional stability, therefore, took some time to emerge precisely because Araucanía, a substantial area of the country, remained a contested region until the late nineteenth century.

Map 1. Mapa de una parte de Chile que comprende el terreno donde pasaron los famosos hechos entre españoles y araucanos by Tomás López de Vargas, 1777. Collection Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

Scholars have tended to think of Mapuches as an exceptional ethnic group because they successfully maintained their independence from the Spanish Empire. This study argues that the ability of Mapuches to strategically utilize parlamentos (peace negotiations), as well as their economic dominance throughout the colonial period, provided them with not just political autonomy but actual political independence. Yet it is precisely these same mechanisms that allowed the newly formed Chilean state to dismantle Mapuche economic networks and take advantage of Mapuche internal political conflicts to subjugate them to state control. This study, then, explains why Mapuches were exceptional and expands the historiography on Indian agency by including them as an essential element of how and why state formation in Chile developed, and how Chile became known for its political and institutional stability in the nineteenth century.

Mapuche is an umbrella term for several indigenous groups of Chile’s southern frontier who speak the same indigenous language. Subgroups include Pehuenches, Huilliches, Abajinos, Costinos, Boroanos, and Araucanos. The Mapungdung language, which all groups have in common, also links the different indigenous groups of central-south Chile and parts of modern-day Argentina.⁵ Guillaume Boccara⁶ argues that the Mapuche were in fact not Mapuches until the nineteenth century. Before this period, Mapuches went through a process that Boccara terms ethnogenesis, by which, as Reches, they resisted and acculturated certain aspects of the system imposed on them by the Spanish and emerged as Mapuches in the nineteenth century. His central thesis states that the Reches/Mapuches did not assimilate into the dominant Spanish–creole society but rather utilized aspects of that society to further enhance their own ethnically unique society, separate and autonomous from that of the colonial state. I follow this line of reasoning in this study, because while periods of peace and religious conversion existed during the colonial period, Mapuches never fully capitulated to the Spanish colonial government’s demands, and they continued to function as independent entities within their own territories in Araucanía.

Even though the different Mapuche groups shared a common language and a large geographical area (Araucanía), they differed in their principal subsistence activities and relations to the land.⁷ The Huilliches (from huilli, meaning south) lived south of the Imperial River. They harvested fruits and berries found on the forest floor and in the lake region of the southern cordillera and on the island of Chiloé. The Pehuenches (from pehuen, or pine, and che, or people) lived along the western inclines of the cordillera and harvested the pine nuts of the araucaria tree.⁸ All groups lived in three distinct geographical locations, or futamapu. There was the lavquenmapu (coastal region), the telfunmapu (the llanos region), and the inapiremapu (piedmont region of the Andes cordillera).⁹ Each futamapu had many ayllarewe (a group of nine rewe, or loosely defined familial units) under one ulmen, or grand man.¹⁰ The general sociopolitical structure of Mapuches was decentralized, as was their economic base. For the most part, Mapuches were self-sufficient, depending on hunting and subsistence farming. They also traded across the different futamapus and among the different Mapuche communities. Each division, including Pehuenches, functioned within their individual communities and territorial futamapus, with little overlap among the different groups.¹¹ In times of war, however, each rewe had a boss of war (gentoqui) and a boss of peace (genovoye). These bosses made decisions for a rewe. Those who did not heed their decisions had to compensate the injured party.¹² The gentoqui and genovoye were called upon only when needed. Further, they were chosen for leadership by merit, which consisted of being exceptional warriors as well as having superior oral skills to impart wisdom in a rational manner.¹³

More recent scholarship takes a transnational approach to Mapuche territory, stressing the importance of what some scholars name the Wallmapu, defined as all Mapuche territory in Mapundung. Sarah Warren maintains that modern Mapuche intellectuals in both Chile and Argentina emphasize the Wallmapu as the opposite of the traditional notion of nation-state borders, in which inhabitants create their own transnational border as a way to disregard borders, emphasize a common territory and identity, and avoid using the language of the states.¹⁴ This transnational approach understands the Wallmapu, rather than physical territory, as the center of Mapucheness, emphasizing the cultural production of flags, maps, a common language, and literature that express a sense of cohesiveness among the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina, and giv[ing] indigenous peoples a sense of the power and wealth they have and what they have been deprived of.… By opening up a transnational vision of the world, it allows people to stop seeing like a nation-state.¹⁵ In the nineteenth century, the Wallmapu may have existed, and Mapuche leaders interacted on both a national and transborder level, as Warren asserts, but as this study illustrates, Mapuches (at least those on the western side of the cordillera) were also concerned with protecting their territory and maintaining their political and economic autonomy from a nation-state that considered Araucanía its southern national border.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, different Mapuche groups controlled large commercial networks, trading among themselves as well as with Spanish–creole settlers on both sides of the Andes cordillera. The main commodities were cattle and horses, but other products, such as salt, wheat, corn, tobacco, and alcohol, were included:

During times of peace there was the opportunity for the development of commerce with the indigenous towns, when both parties were interested. Three or four caravans, loaded with goods, would head to determined points deep into the Andes to trade with the Indians. They would trade wheat, corn and metal products for salt and cattle. This trade must have been very successful because for three rings of iron to use with a horse’s bridle, the Indians would give two horses or one fat cow. For wine and tobacco, they paid any price, and even though there was a strict prohibition and even ex-communion on these products, alcoholic beverages, arms and gun powder were exported.¹⁶

Horses, which the Spanish introduced to Chile in the sixteenth century, became an important Mapuche commodity, both for the extensive and lucrative market in cattle and other goods and for resistance against the Spanish and later the Chilean state.¹⁷ One foreign traveler in Chile in the early nineteenth century described Mapuche horses as constituting one of the objects of early commerce, and still very much admired; they are recognized by certain exterior features, above all the wide face and large hooves, which are shapeless but very useful over lava.… They are very good at resisting even the Chilean race, and are as sure-footed as mules in the high mountains.¹⁸

Conchavadores (merchants) dominated colonial trade and acted as middlemen between Mapuches and the Spanish–creole settlers in Araucanía.¹⁹ After independence, the economic landscape would begin to change. Fighting between creole patriots and royalists (those loyal to the Spanish crown) would disrupt commercial networks in Araucanía and elsewhere because those fighting were part of either one group or the other. Mapuches fought on both sides of the conflict. By the mid-1820s, the royalists, now defeated, would lose their economic networks to the newly expanding Chilean Republic. From 1810 to 1830, Chilean patriots fought against Spain for independence while simultaneously seeking to consolidate a strong, centralized republic.

Independence and la guerra a muerte

Bernardo O’Higgins, the Argentine general José de San Martín, and the army San Martín brought across the Andes were the heroes of Chilean independence. After the patriot defeat on March 19, 1818, at the Battle of Cancha Rayada, where O’Higgins was severely wounded, San Martín regrouped. On April 5, 1818, he and O’Higgins defeated the Spanish general Mariano Osorio on the plains of Maipo, just outside Santiago.²⁰ That battle marked Chile’s official independence from Spain but not the end of the Spanish presence in Chile. After the defeat at Maipo, Osorio and the remnants of his army retreated six hundred kilometers south to Talcahuano to retake Concepción and then to head north to Santiago. O’Higgins, now the leader of liberated Chile, knew the Spanish threat still existed and appointed Ramón Freire as intendant of the province of Concepción, south of the capital. O’Higgins also named Brigadier Antonio González Balcarce as commander of the force to expel the Spanish from Concepción. Osorio did not stay long in Talcahuano. He sailed for Peru (still a Spanish stronghold) in September 1818 and left the Spanish officer Juan Francisco Sánchez in charge. Sánchez became the head of the Spanish contingent in Chile, located principally in Concepción Province.²¹